There are a ton of other features like measuring the impact guest posts/mentions on other sites (which it auto detects) have on search visibility, keyword difficulty calculators, automatic keyword research & so much more.

The future of rank tracking has arrived. And it's super cheap too!

#2 - SEMRush

SEMRush is the tool for SEO’s right now. In fact, I recently posted about how there are 68 ways you can use it to massively improve your SEO results.

It allows you to specifically target sections of your competitors search campaigns – from Backlinks to adverts and their highest performing content – so you can pick them apart and attack with laser precision.

It also has one of the most comprehensive keyword tools on the market. You can build an entire SEO campaign without ever leaving this tool, and for $69.95 a month, it’s a steal.

It is my favourite tool to find all of my competitors best backlinks so that I can easily steal them for myself!

As well as having the biggest database of backlinks, they also have a number of other handy tools such as the content explorer, keyword explorer, monitoring the SEO health of your site, monitoring new/lost links and more.

One of really handy feature is being able to check exactly which keywords you or your competitors are ranking for-

That makes it really easy to find awesome 1st page keyword opportunities that you can drive into the top 3 results with minimal effort, although you can do that with SEMRush & SEOMonitor as well.

#7 - Screaming Frog

This crawl tool has one main objective: save you time on site audits. And, that’s exactly what it does.

Enter a site’s URL and it’ll crawl to give you a complete look at the site, and in-depth information about each page.

You’ll never wait more than a few minutes for a report and the data it gives you is so valuable.

#8 - Panguin Tool

Think your traffic might have been affected by a Google Update?

Well, now there is a way to tell. The Panguin tool shows you when the last Panda or Penguin update was and if it correlates with your traffic statistics.

By logging in with your Google Analytics data, it overlays your traffic data giving you a visual look at whether an algorithm change was to blame:

If you see a dramatic drop off after a major update, you can begin to find out what the problem was and how you can get back into Google’s good graces. But, be sure to do your research outside of the tool as well, just to be sure.

#9 - DeepCrawl

It makes performing extensive SEO audits a 1 click process which delivers all of the results in an easy to digest dashboard or fancy PDF reports, whichever you prefer.

Although there are other crawler tools available like Screaming Frog, none of them go to the depth that DeepCrawl does. For example it also detects duplicate content issues and has no problem crawling large sites.

One of the features that I really like is the ability to compare crawls, so you can easily track your progress as you fix errors that are reported.

I use this tool with all of my clients and you would be amazed at the things you find. Always take care of on page SEO before anything else, no amount of backlinks will rank a badly optimised site.

It might not look all that powerful on the surface, but all of those little tick boxes mean it can be configured to accomplish a range of tasks & can lookup huge volumes of data for thousands of URL's in just 1 click.

#20 - IPVanish

The IPVanish VPN service isn't strictly an SEO tool as it secures your connection & encrypts all of your browsing.

But it does make it easy to spoof your location from nearly anywhere in the world with a swift click of the mouse-

That means you can check search results from other countries reliably or accurately test geo targeting while improving your connection security at the same time.

This is an amazing list. Most of what is listed, I had no idea about. I think I will have to test a few to see what fits for my level of knowledge of SEO. I still consider myself a rookie with a little bit of knowledge. Thanks for all the tips. Your blog is amazing. I need this kind of powerful content on my blog.

Thanks for this list. I agree that nowadays it’s almost impossible for an SEO to work without some tools, they really save lots of time, so you can work more effective and pay attention to more important tasks.

I’ve never had a chance to try SEO Monitor, will definitely give it a look.

And for doing site audits, I use Netpeak Spider, a handy tool, it spots main SEO issues and presents this data in a special panel. This can also be a mini SEO report :)

Well, you’re right. Duplicate pages detection is not a tool’s main feature, it finds full page dupes and also duplicates of h1, titles, descriptions.
But I mainly use the tool to find other common mistakes like broken links, images without alt, etc. Also, there are some new cool features as calculation of internal PageRank which helps in improving site linking structure.

Just curious, but do you have an article on Yoast SEO Premium? I’ve been toying around with the idea of using it, but I have never seen a post of anyone actually explaining how they use it for their website. I think it would be a neat addition, if you do not have this already. It seems pretty common sense, but I kind of like seeing how people do things. :)

Thank you for another great article, the write up on SEM rush (linked from here I think) is very detailed, I will use it to prompt me what to do. I have just got a SEO job for a site and this will help no end. Cheers mate.

Matthew your site is a treasure trove.
You have inspired me to take up arms, after a back injury.
I’ve got myself a ecom website and with all of your advice,tip and tricks im going to Matthew Woodward the h*** out of it.
Thank you so b***** much.